Archive for October, 2007

The greatness of Polish poetry

Wednesday, October 24th, 2007

As you know if you read my events list, Adam Zagajewski is reading in Hyde Park tonight, as part of the Poem Present series. Here’s the full notice:

POEM PRESENT
Reading and Lecture Series

ADAM ZAGAJEWSKI

READING: WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 24
Franke Institute for the Humanities
Regenstein Library, 1100 E. 57th Street
6:00pm (note time)

*A reception will follow the reading

POEM PRESENT is pleased to have the opportunity to present a reading by Professor Adam Zagajewski, who joined the faculty of The Committee on Social Thought this Fall.

Adam Zagajewski lives in Krakow and Chicago. His collections in English translation include Tremor (1985), Canvas (1991), Mysticism for Beginners (1997), Another Beauty (2000), and the anthology Without End (2002). Among his books of essays are Solidarity, Solitude (1986, tr. 1989) and Two Cities (1991, tr. 1995). Zagajewski has also written several novels, in addition to editing Polish Writers on Writing (Trinity University Press, 2007). His most recent collection of poems, Eternal Enemies, will be published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

You know how I feel about Zagajewski. Milosz is dead. Herbert is dead. Szymborska is still writing but now 80 years old. I don’t think you’ll have many more chances to witness the greatness of twentieth-century Polish poetry in person.

Someday soon I’ll post about his reading last week at the ALSC conference, in which he read alongside Reginald Gibbons and Mary Kinzie. But tonight is all Zagajewski.

Share on Facebook

Zagajewski | Comments (2)

Transfixed by their future

Tuesday, October 9th, 2007

From “The Self-Inventing Man,” by V. S. Pritchett, in the November 6, 1969, issue of The New York Review of Books:

Stendhal’s method is to put a collection of static shots or stills together and to give a questioning, disjointed motion to them; the narrative flows only where he intervenes in one of his disguises. He is a restless rather than a flowing novelist. He is always beginning again. This abruptness is the making of his portraits of young men; here no novelist has surpassed him, not even Tolstoy. To be continually startled is to be young. No one has so defined and botanized the fervor, uncertainty, conceit, timidity, and single-mindedness of young men, their dash, their shames, their passion for tactics and gesture. They shed self after self and are always becoming something else; this, though with less elan, for in Stendhal’s world they are passive, as is true of his women. Stendhal’s sense of human beings living now yet transfixed, for an affecting moment, by their future, gives the doctrine of self-invention a depth which is not often noticeable in its practitioners today.

Share on Facebook

Pritchett, Stendhal | Comments (2)